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Speaker cone shape

Why are speakers cone shaped, apart from rigidity? To my mind the air being pushed by a cone would radiate at an angle inward toward the axis of the speaker and collide in the centre, which seems inefficient to me, and likely to cause some distortion of the sound. This may also cause interference to adjacent speakers on the same baffle.  Would there be any advantage to having the surface flat, assuming you could maintain rigidity without increasing the mass? There must be modern capable materials out there.
Is the fact that the speaker is cone shaped that causes the volume to change counter intuitively as you move left and right in front of the speakers? What I mean by counter intuitively is when you move left the right speaker sounds louder and visa versa.
chris_w_uk

Showing 1 response by russ69

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russ69
3,570 posts
 
"...Lincoln Walsh was a pioneering expert on radar design back in the Forties! I think he may have invented the perfect speaker!..."

A good example for this thread on speaker cone design. Walsh's full range driver was very interesting but the cone was so big that there were problems with cone break-up and distortion at high levels. As a mechanical engineer, you can quickly surmise that all electro-mechanical  drivers have trade-offs, nothing yet is the perfect radiator but the state of the art is still very very good. 
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